


Damaged

by lyricwritesprose



Series: Damaged [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Aziraphale Angst (Good Omens), Aziraphale goes into the uncanny valley sometimes, Aziraphale is psychologically messed up, Gen, Minor Sergeant Shadwell/Madame Tracy (Good Omens), does this count as psychological hurt/comfort?, more angsty than my usual, not in continuity with my other serieses, still a fair bit of humor though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:27:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22325554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Madame Tracy helps people.  When she visits the bookshop after Armageddon, though, she finds a person who wants to convince her that he doesn't need help.  In fact, he seems to be doing his best to convince her that he isn't a person.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Madame Tracy (Good Omens)
Series: Damaged [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1627570
Comments: 114
Kudos: 375
Collections: Amazing Good Omens





	Damaged

Tracy wasn’t psychic. In her own head, if nowhere else, she was very firm on this point. She was a decent enough cold reader, and people wanted to believe what they wanted to believe, and that was the end of it.

So she wasn’t _sensing_ anything from the closed shop. That would be ridiculous.

Tracy had come to deliver invitations to her housewarming party, and see if invitations to her wedding (when and if she managed to get the man to propose) would be remotely welcome. Mr. Shadwell1 had _his_ address. Tracy had very complicated feelings about _him,_ but on the whole she thought that saving the world should bring people together. She had gone into Soho, and looked for the bookshop, and found it closed, with the blinds drawn.

And it was purely her imagination that the shop was radiating a sort of dull misery, because shops didn’t do that and even if they did, she wouldn’t be able to sense it.

She was going to pick the lock and go in, just to check. She could feel it.

To give herself an air of respectability, though, she went to the nearby cafe and asked how long the shop had been closed. One of the baristas said three days, one of them said five. Considering that the shop had been mostly closed for the last eleven years, neither of them thought this was extraordinary. One of the baristas recounted a dismayingly vivid dream in which the shop had been on fire, and did Tracy believe in premonitions?

Tracy didn’t, but she said she would warn the proprietor if she managed to catch him.

Back to the bookshop, and a quick look at the hours posted on the door. Tracy read them, and tried to decode them, and then said, “Well, that’s a lot of nonsense, isn’t it?” and took a pin out of her purse.

The lock was an antique. Easy to pick. Tracy would have expected more security.

The shop was very dim inside, and cluttered. Somewhere, a phone was ringing, not the jaunty tune of a mobile but the honest-to-goodness _ring_ of an old-fashioned phone. It cut off as Tracy edged nervously into the shop.

Now that she was in here, she didn’t want to be in here. She had a distinct feeling that she should just go.

Really, she should go.

When she came right down to it, the only thing she knew about Mr. Aziraphale was that he had wanted to stop the Apocalypse and that he was willing to murder a child to do it. She didn’t want to examine the memory of her body moving and talking without her input, or the moment when she realized that they weren’t collaborating anymore, that he was _going to do it,_ and her only chance was to wrestle control away from something that seemed suddenly, and terrifyingly, very strong indeed. She had been so desperately out of her depth—

And then she realized, with a lurch, that she had just looked right past him. He was here. Sitting at his desk, staring straight ahead.

People shouldn’t sit so still that you mistook them for part of the bookshelves on your first pass. Tracy drew a not entirely steady breath, and said, “Mr. Aziraphale! There you are! I hope you don’t mind me coming in, I was dreadfully worried. The nice girl in the cafe, you know the one with those expensive raspberry swirls, she said that you hadn’t opened up in almost a week . . .”

She trailed off. Mr. Aziraphale hadn’t moved.

In fact, he wasn’t breathing.

Tracy took a couple of steps closer, ignoring her instincts. He looked—much the same as he had looked at the air base, down to the clothes, but now he had a look of understated misery much like the aura that she _absolutely hadn’t sensed_ from the shop. And he was sitting stiller than any person possibly could, and she thought there was a bit of dust on his shoulders.

If he was trapped somehow, there wasn’t much she could do to help.

On the other hand, Tracy felt that there were some remedies that should at least be tried whatever the problem was. She said, “I’ll get you a _nice_ cup of tea,” and edged around him so that she could find the kitchen.

The kitchen, which was more of a kitchenette, was located in the back, and to her immense relief Tracy finally found a light switch. The light seemed dull and dreary, but it was at least light.

She had been half-expecting some horrorshow of a kitchen. After all, she was used to Mr. S, who had the housekeeping abilities of a feral rat and a refrigerator that he didn’t open because sheer denial was easier than coping with it. Instead, this kitchen was immaculate.

That didn’t mean the organization made any sense. Tracy opened multiple cabinets before she found a kettle.

She put the kettle on and waited nervously. If a watched pot never boiled, she was doomed to a never-whistling kettle. On the other hand, in here she was _doing_ something, and out there she had to cope with a darkened bookshop and an inhuman being who was sitting frozen for unknown reasons, and neither of those appealed.

She busied herself for a moment finding the teapot. Then she pulled out her mobile and managed a few rounds of one of those matching games. Tracy liked her matching games. They all involved jewels or sweets or something equally cheery, and they came in bright, engaging colors, and it didn’t really matter if you won or lost. She didn’t understand half the apps on her mobile, and she didn’t use it for as much as the kids today did—when Tracy did her accounts, which she was meticulous about, she used pen and paper, not some spreadsheet app—but she liked the matching games.

The kettle whistled.

Tracy took it off the heat. “Now, let’s see,” she said aloud—not too loud, she was still battling with the distinct impression that she wasn’t welcome here. “Tea. Where would I keep a box of tea—”

“The white canisters.”

Despite herself, Tracy jumped, and let out a short shriek, and splashed boiling water on her right hand, and found herself trying to shriek as she breathed _in,_ which didn’t work.

Mr. Aziraphale took the kettle from her. Tracy had to fight her instincts and force herself to turn her back on him and run cold water over her wounded hand. There was something intensely _not-normal_ about him. “Tea is in the white canisters, and there’s an infuser in the drawer,” he said, in frostily polite tones. Not that he was letting her make the tea; he measured out a careful amount of loose-leaf into the infuser as he spoke, and put it in the teapot. “I appreciate the effort, but it really isn’t necessary.”

“You looked to be in a state,” Tracy managed.

He didn’t want her here, Tracy thought. He didn’t want her here, and he had, in fact, startled her deliberately—he hadn’t meant to make her burn herself, but he wanted her to be uncomfortable enough that she just left.

“Yes. Well. I imagine these things would tend to happen. There isn’t exactly a precedent.”

“Why don’t you sit down,” Tracy said, “and I’ll get the tea together, and you can tell me what you mean. It isn’t healthy to be sitting all alone in the dark, Mr. A. I remember you take it black, do you have sugar on hand, or—”

“Furthest white canister to the left,” Mr. Aziraphale said.

“Ta.” It took a moment more of searching to find teacups, which Tracy rather suspected were antique china.

The first time she’d talked to Mr. Aziraphale, it had been over tea. And she had been coping with the surreal and somewhat frightening sensation of a voice that wasn’t hers, coming out of a mouth she hadn’t intended to move. Watching him in the mirror had helped, a little bit. Made it easier to pretend that he wasn’t—doing what he was doing. But he had won her over, then. He had been pleasant, and polite, and much more _human-_ seeming than this. If she’d had to deal with this—this eeriness—well, Tracy would have still agreed to try to save the world, it was the _world_ after all, but she would have gone into it with a lot more fear.

He had sat down at the kitchen table, now, and he was doing the thing where he didn’t move. Not even a twitch. Not even breathing.

Either he was not bothering to act human in the hopes that it would see her off, or there was something actually wrong. Tracy went to the table. “Mr. A.”

He focused on her. That was something. The fact that nothing moved except his eyes was distinctly unnerving, but it was better than staring through her.

“I need to know if you’re—sick.”

“How much,” Mr. Aziraphale said, “do you remember?”

“Everything while you were—” _Inside me_ sounded too much like a euphemism, but the alternative was to actually use words like _possession,_ and Tracy wasn’t sure she was ready for that. “Well. The memories get a little blurry after Adam put you back to rights. Still, I think I got _most_ of it.”

“Then you should remember that I’m not the sort of being who can get sick.”

“How am I supposed to know who can get sick and who can’t? For all I know, you could get the celestial sniffles from staying out in the rain one too many times.” She went back to the counter, got the tea, and busied herself with pouring it, left-handed.

Mr. Aziraphale thanked her. Tracy didn’t think he meant it. The light in the kitchen was still dreary, and there was starting to be an unidentifiable but unpleasant smell, and Tracy was virtually certain that Mr. Aziraphale was _doing_ the latter, because it hadn’t smelled like that when she came in.

She wasn’t sure what he could or couldn’t do. Completely unknown territory.

Well, there was no point worrying about it. If you spent all your time fretting about what people who were stronger than you could do to you, you’d never get anything done. “Where’s your young man, then?”

“He isn’t,” Mr. Aziraphale said. He took a sip of tea.

He still wasn’t moving like a human being. He was moving like a person who was wearing his body as an awkward sort of suit, and it was meant to make Tracy afraid. What he didn’t realize, she thought, was that it was working, and the fact that it was working would make her exponentially more stubborn. Being told to go away, and actually leaving for good? Not entirely Tracy’s strong suit. “Isn’t what?” she asked.

“He isn’t a young man. And he isn’t mine.”

“Well, I think he might have some things to say about _that,_ Mr. A.” Perhaps supernatural beings made a regular habit of driving burning cars, but Tracy was fairly certain they didn’t swagger out of them with a quip if they weren’t playing peacock for whoever they had their eye on. “Where is he?”

“He has lots of things to do.”

Tracy spoke Lover’s Spat. Fluently. “You two had a bit of a tiff, didn’t you?”

She got a sharp look.

“Come on, tell us about it. It can’t be as bad as all that.”

“It’s really none of your concern, Madame Tracy.”

“It’s not _Madame_ anymore,” Tracy said. “Just Tracy.”

“You aren’t doing seances anymore?”

Tracy couldn’t suppress the faint shudder. She knew he saw it, and she knew that _he_ knew he’d got to her. “I don’t think I’d dare,” she said, honestly enough. “The next—supernatural person—along, might not be a gentleman. And Mr. S. wouldn’t be able to see them off, the way he sometimes does for clients who get stroppy.” It wasn’t that Shadwell was especially imposing, or especially dangerous, but there was something about having an obviously unhinged Scotsman ranting at you about nipples and accusing you of bearing diseases that were only found in particularly unfortunate sheep. Tracy thought he managed to give her more aggressive ex-clients the distinct impression that he might bite, and they wouldn’t enjoy what they would catch if he did. It wasn’t the sort of thought most people would smile tenderly at, but she did anyway.

“Probably wise,” Mr. Aziraphale allowed. “I didn’t realize that seance attendees were so prone to be—difficult. It used to be very much the done thing for respectable people.”

Tracy had a nasty lurch as she realized that he didn’t _know._

When he arrived, when they (she) had sat down for tea and he had told her that he was an angel, she had wondered at an angel not being bothered by the fact that she was a sex worker. After a few moments, she had decided that he was being too polite to mention professions, and therefore _she_ wouldn’t mention professions either, and at any rate they ought to get on with saving the world, which really seemed like a task for someone younger and brawnier and without arthritis in their knees. And from there she stopped thinking about it.

But if he hadn’t actually read her mind, if he didn’t _know—_ that was a little different.

Because she didn’t know how offended he would get.

And she had a very vivid memory of her own fingers clicking, and the guard at the gate vanishing into nothingness, and the fact that Mr. Aziraphale didn’t even know where he had gone.

“Well, it takes all sorts, you know,” Tracy said vaguely, to cover the way her mind was racing. “When were seances respectable?”

“Around the eighteen nineties or so. Crowley used to disrupt them rather.” This was apparently a fond memory, and then Mr. Aziraphale evidently recalled that they’d quarreled.

“He likes being a rogue, your young man,” Tracy said. She had accepted, in theory, that an angel would be immortal, but she hadn’t entirely processed the idea that he might reminisce about things that happened over a hundred years ago. Should she ask him how old he was?

“He _isn’t._ He isn’t young, he isn’t a man, he isn’t—” Mr. Aziraphale looked away. “He is a bit of a rogue, though.”

“Whatever you quarreled over, it can’t be as bad as all that,” Tracy told him. “Why don’t you give him a ring? Find out if he’s over it? When did you have this argument, anyway?”

“About six days ago.”

“Mr. A, please don’t tell me you’ve been sitting alone in the dark since then.”

“No,” Mr. Aziraphale said, somewhat to her surprise. “First I—” He hesitated. “Well, I suppose I had a bit of a wobble. Everything rather hit me at once.”

“Everything?”

He didn’t meet her eyes. “You don’t want to hear it.”

“Mr. _Aziraphale,”_ Tracy chided. “I’m here, aren’t I? Of course I want to hear it.”

He shook his head. A stiff motion that reminded her of failing clockwork.

“You’re not going to feel better unless you talk to someone. Believe me, I know.” Because the amount of sex work that didn’t actually involve sex, but rather listening to lonely men—the people who heard the woes of the world were sex workers and bartenders. Actual psychologists, in Tracy’s opinion, probably came in a distant third. And serve them right for being so odd about people’s mothers.

“There are things about the world that you _don’t want to know.”_

“I’m not exactly a sheltered maiden. Haven’t been one for a very long time.” No, she probably shouldn’t have said that, should she? “You’re not going to shock me, Mr. A. And you ought to talk to _someone,_ so you might as well do it now before the tea gets cold.” She took a sip, reminded by her own words, holding the teacup a bit awkwardly with her unburned left hand.

He looked at her. The feeling of _not belonging here_ surged. This was not a normal place. This was not a _human_ place. The kitchen was too small, and it was the wrong shape, and it made her sit too close to him, when what she really wanted was to be miles away and never think about this again. Never think about _him_ again.

“If Mr. Shadwell can’t run me off, you’re not going to manage it,” Tracy told herself as well as him. “Now stop being an old silly and talk to me.”

“Heaven wanted the war,” Mr. Aziraphale said.

“What?”

“I told you that I couldn’t get in contact with Heaven. That was a lie. I had just come from there. I spoke to the most powerful angel in Heaven, and begged for the life of humanity, and he turned me down. _That’s_ when I got discorporated, and fled Heaven, and came to you.”

“Where’s God in all this?” Tracy asked. Despite herself, she _was_ a little shaken. And she wasn’t entirely sure what _discorporated_ meant, except that it didn’t sound pleasant at all. A bit like _defenestrated._

“No-one knows.”

“Mr. A, they didn’t—they didn’t _cast you out,_ did they? For trying to stop the end of the world? That’s—” Anger bloomed on his behalf. “That’s the most _pigheaded_ thing I think I’ve ever heard, and I’m in love with _Sergeant Shadwell.”_

“I haven’t Fallen,” Mr. Aziraphale said. “But I’m not exactly welcome, either. You’re in _love_ with Shadwell?”

Tracy shrugged very slightly. “I have been for a very long time. It’s—” She had a distinct weakness for damaged people, she’d known that for a while, and Shadwell was nothing if not damaged. “Well, sometimes these things are very hard to explain. He’s very frightened, you know. Very frightened, and a bit of a coward about it, and then he goes and tries to be brave anyway. He really does believe that he was protecting the world.”

“A bit like I believed I was doing good in it, I suppose,” Mr. Aziraphale said bitterly.

“Now, don’t be like that. You don’t want to go listening to _them,_ Mr. A. Is that what the row was about? You and Heaven?”

Mr. Aziraphale took a drink of tea before he responded. “I was—upset,” he said finally, “because there’s no point to me anymore. If I’m not doing things for Heaven, what am I for? Crowley didn’t like that. He had quite a lot to say about it. None of it polite.”

“I can imagine,” Tracy said. “You never want to go deciding that your purpose in life is _for someone else._ Especially not people who tried to end the world.”

“If I’d been better, I could have talked them out of it.”

“Now, you can’t know that, and I doubt it. And anyway, people who have to be _talked out of_ ending the world, you don’t want to trust their judgment above your own, do you?” That wasn’t working. She could see that it wasn’t working. “Mr. Crowley doesn’t understand,” Tracy said, making the connection as she spoke. “You miss them even though they’ve been perfectly dreadful, even though you wouldn’t come back if they asked.”

“What would you know about it?” It came out just short of snappish, the rudest she had ever heard Mr. Aziraphale, and Tracy knew that she’d struck a nerve.

“Only that my family threw me out for being no better than I should be, and I had to make a living—”

She had not meant to say that.

What was he going to do, now that she had said that?

“You were in the trade,” Mr. Aziraphale realized.

She really should not have said that.

She watched him notice her fear. Watched him consider using her fear to get rid of her. Watched him think about how _easy_ it would be, and how much he wanted to.

Watched him reject the idea. “It’s all right,” Mr. Aziraphale said softly. “I won’t hurt you. Wouldn’t hurt you.” And he looked somehow more _personlike_ as he said it. The smell was gone. The kitchen was just shaped like a kitchen. He made a vague gesture. “Here.”

Tracy’s right hand suddenly stopped hurting. Completely.

“Thank you,” she said.

He shook his head. “I should have done it before. I was _going_ to do it when you left.”

Because he wasn’t willing to leave her in pain for any longer than it took to get her out of his shop, Tracy interpreted. He was willing to be unpleasant to get her to leave him alone with his misery. He was willing to come right up to the edge of cruel, but not go over it. “It’s all right,” she said. And then, “You’re right. I was in the trade. I don’t hate the work, and I’m not ashamed of it, but I _bitterly_ regret how I started. I—understand, if it means you can’t associate with me.”

He gave her a slightly bewildered look. “I live in _Soho._ At any rate, Heaven isn’t my family. I don’t have a family.”

“If you don’t have a family, then Heaven is the closest thing to it, surely,” Tracy said. “Listen. It took me—years—to get over it. Despite the harm they did me. Despite the way they treated me. I can tell you haven’t been treated _right,_ Mr. A, and I also know that sometimes, that barely matters. You still feel the grief.” Time for a little guesswork. “I also know that sometimes, people will try to talk you out of a bleak mood by saying, _forget about them, they weren’t worth much anyway,_ and you could just about throw a teapot at them, because it’s not about whether they treated you right, it’s about having a chance to grieve. But the people who say _forget about them,_ they really are trying to help. They’re your friends. Chasing them away . . .”

Mr. Aziraphale looked stricken. Tracy thought that she was, if anything, perhaps a bit _too_ right.

Most men didn’t like it when they were at the point of blinking back tears. Admittedly, she didn't have as much experience with gay celestial entities, but she had to be careful, here.

The phone rang in the outer shop, and Tracy jumped, almost spilling her tea. More tense than she had thought she was.

Mr. Aziraphale didn’t make a move to answer it, and after a moment, Tracy figured out why. “How often has he been calling?”

“I think he’s down to every twenty minutes, now,” Mr. Aziraphale admitted. “I haven’t been keeping track of time. I’ve been a bit—empty.”

“Maybe you need a nice lie-down,” Tracy advised. “But first, you ought to talk to your young man. I imagine he’s worried sick.”

“He isn’t my young man. And he isn’t worried. He has all sorts of things to do, and they don’t involve me.”

The evidence of the phone calls entirely to the contrary, Tracy thought. “You won’t know,” she pointed out, “until you talk to him.”

Mr. Aziraphale looked away. “If I talk to him, he’ll just go away again.” It was nearly a whisper.

“Now, Mr. A, we both know that’s not true.” Did he know it? “What about your other friends? Isn’t there someone around here you could have a nice chat with? Maybe a friend of Mr. Crowley too?”

Mr. Aziraphale looked faintly confused. “I don’t have any other friends. I used to know a lot of people around here, but—I spent eleven years trying to stop Armageddon, and they’ll have moved on, and anyway, they weren’t _friends_ as such.”

“Well, we have to fix _that,”_ Tracy said decisively.

“The only other people to make friends with are humans.”

“And I know you don’t think you’re too good for us,” Tracy retorted, “or you wouldn’t have defied all of Heaven to save us, so what’s holding you back?”

“You do rather have a tendency to die,” Mr. Aziraphale said. “And besides. I’m—not all that good at it.”

“I can help,” Tracy told him. “I can make friends anywhere. No, we’ve got to get you out of the shop, Mr. A. Find something nice for you to do. I was going to invite you to our housewarming party—we’ve got a new cottage out in the countryside—but I would understand if you don’t want to deal with Mr. S. He did call you a number of names.”

“I can hardly be offended at being called a great pansy when I go out of my way to _be_ a great pansy,” Mr. Aziraphale said, with a little more spirit. “What bothers me is—well—I’m not entirely certain he knows what it means.”

“I’m absolutely certain he doesn’t,” Tracy said. “Mr. S is the sort of person—well, he was switched for not playing the hard man when he was barely old enough not to cry at a split lip, and he’s the sort of person who assumes that the things he was hurt for as a child must actually be _wrong,_ or else he doesn’t know how to make sense of things. He hasn’t dug into the why and the wherefore and what the word even means. Besides, there are a lot of things that he—doesn’t understand very well.”2 She sipped the last of her tea. “But that’s two weeks from now, and you have plenty of time to decide if you want to come. We should get you out of the shop _now,_ this afternoon. It doesn’t do you any good to sit in the dark.”

Mr. Aziraphale shook his head. This time, it looked human.

“I’m not going to take no for an answer, Mr. A. Friends don’t let friends make themselves miserable, not when there’s something we can do to help. Let’s go out to the park.”

§

Really, Tracy thought, they hardly knew each other. It felt like they did, but they didn’t.

“Honestly, I started doing seances so that I would have a way of declaring income on my taxes,” she told him. “Also tarot readings, although I’ve let that slide these last few years. That’s all entertainment, you know, and perfectly legal, even though you could make an argument that the other is more honest. But I turned out to be good at it. Until you, I never contacted a single spirit.”

“How does that count as being good at it?” Mr. Aziraphale wondered. He had produced a bag of peas from somewhere mysterious and was gradually leading a duck closer and closer, pea by pea. Tracy wondered if she should tell him that feeding the ducks wasn’t technically allowed.

Being in the sunlight did seem to be helping him. Tracy wondered if it was just the normal result of being out and doing, or whether light itself had some sort of beneficial effect on angels. He still wasn’t _all right,_ but he seemed better.

“Nobody actually wants to hear from the spirit world,” Tracy explained. “They want to hear that their loved ones are happy and love them very much, or they want someone to talk to, or they want a good show. An actual spirit would be—” Frightening. “A bit much. And tarot is the same way. It’s not about telling the future. It’s more a reassurance that they’re going to have one. I know just enough about the cards to make it sound good.”

“Which deck?”

“Nothing fancy. Rider-Waite. The first one was a gift from a friend, you see. She went all in on the fortune telling—crystal ball and everything. Unfortunately, the thing about crystal balls is that there’s a _reason_ to use them in dark rooms, because a good shaft of sunlight can just about set a client’s hair on fire, which means a lot of yelling and screaming and the client’s Pomeranian widdling all over the carpet. All in all, they were very lucky that the hair was a wig, and even then the woman threatened to sue poor Maureen for the cost of it, can you imagine. A wig! But that was when Maureen decided to go back to school and become an accountant, and she passed on most of her stuff to me. How about you, how did you come to have a bookshop?”

“Honestly,” Mr. Aziraphale said, “it started mainly as a place to store my books. I’d been collecting them for—quite a long time. Ever since the Library of Alexandria.” His face darkened and he looked away.

“What happened there?” Tracy asked.

“It burned down.”

“Oh, my goodness.” Tracy had no special reverence for libraries, but there was no mistaking that tone of voice. It said that gutting him would have been kinder.

“And ever since then, I couldn’t bear to trust any book I really cared about to a library. It wasn’t that many back before the printing press, but afterwards? It’s difficult to explain, these days, what it was like. Going from a time when a book was a rare and precious thing, when you spent hours inking and gilding a capital letter because it would be such a valuable object, and then the next thing you know, they’re coming out of a machine. Some people thought it would be the downfall of civilization. Some people thought it would be the saving of it. Anyone who could put in the research, who could make themselves expert on a subject, could write a book now.”

“And then you have fiction,” Tracy reflected, “where nobody needs to be an expert. I read a book once which was supposed to be based on real church history and code-breaking and such, and I found out later that it was all _made up._ Even the bits that weren’t supposed to be. I was so cross."

"I think Crowley—"

"You think Crowley what?" Mr. Crowley said, from the other side of him.

Tracy jumped. The duck that Mr. Aziraphale had coaxed within reach made a noise and ran for it, feet flapping.

"I think," Mr. Aziraphale said, unflustered, “that Crowley is trying to get me to read that one just to see how annoyed I get.”

“Mr. Crowley!” Tracy said happily, to cover up the fact that he had given her a shock and she wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t appeared out of thin air. “What luck. I came to ask you both if you wanted to come to our housewarming party. We’re moving in two weeks—”

“Absolutely not,” Mr. Aziraphale said.

Tracy stopped. She couldn’t _blame_ him, Shadwell was extremely—Shadwellian, but she did so want to keep an eye on Mr. Aziraphale. He needed friends, needed them badly . . .

“You will not,” Mr. Aziraphale went on severely, “lie to Shadwell and tell him that you have thirty-seven nipples just to see if he collapses. You could give the poor man a stroke!”

Oh. Not a rejection of the housewarming party at all, then. “I promise,” Mr. Crowley said, “that I won’t tell Shadwell I have thirty-seven nipples.”

Mr. Aziraphale pressed his lips together.

“Really. You can have it in writing if you want.”

“I was not,” Mr. Aziraphale said, “actualized yesterday.”3

“You can’t expect me to go and not do _something.”_

“Isn’t it enough,” Tracy wondered, “that Mr. S. thinks you’re Mafia?”

“You really shouldn’t have told him that,” Mr. Aziraphale said, resigned.

Mr. Crowley, for his part, looked as if he were happily lost in the myriad possibilities afforded by encouraging the belief as hard as possible. It occurred to Tracy that she should find out exactly what sort of supernatural being Mr. Crowley was, at the earliest possible opportunity. The suppressed but unholy glee on his face implied that _also an angel_ was not one of the possibilities. “Oh, dear,” Tracy said, half to herself.

“She wanted to invite you over,” Mr. Crowley went on abruptly. “That doesn’t explain what you’re doing out here, right now. Or what you were so upset about, twenty minutes ago.”

Tracy wasn’t psychic. Definitely. Crowley, apparently, was very psychic. Or—wait. “How could you know he was upset and not know that I had come round?” Tracy asked.

“I know when _he’s_ in trouble. I don’t care when _you’re_ in trouble,” Mr. Crowley told her.

Tracy briefly considered explaining that there was no point being rude at her, because she’d been ruded at by _experts._ (Well, one expert in particular.) Before she could say anything, Mr. Aziraphale said, “Crowley, that isn’t fair.”

“I don’t do fair.”

“The truth is, I’m feeling rather better now. And I think it’s mostly down to Miss Tracy—interfering. Even if I did rather get up because I was annoyed, more than anything else . . .” He gave Tracy a somewhat apologetic look.

Tracy hadn’t been called _Miss_ Tracy for quite some time indeed. Still, if anyone was going to, it might as well be someone who predated the printing press. “I don’t care whether you were annoyed or not,” she said, “just so long as you _started moving_ again. You frightened me half to death, like that.”

Mr. Crowley looked at him closely. “You have dust in your hair.”

Mr. Aziraphale put a hand through his hair self-consciously. “Yes. Well. There didn’t seem much point in me doing anything. Without directives from Heaven—”

“The lot of _them,”_ Mr. Crowley interrupted, with a sweeping gesture indicating the park, “get on perfectly well without directives, or higher purpose, or orders, or any other _bloody wankery_ from On High, and the two of us can manage the same. I thought you would be relieved.”

“I had thought so too,” Mr. Aziraphale admitted. “It just—rather all piled up on me.”

It was hard to tell with the dark glasses, but Tracy thought Mr. Crowley gave her a meaningful look. And she _thought_ it was a look that said, _all right. Grudgingly, you and I are on the same team, and that team is the Help Mr. Aziraphale Out Of Bleak Moods team._

She nodded, trying to give a look back that said, _it’s a deal._ And then wondered if deals were the safest thing to make with whatever Mr. Crowley was.

“Right,” Mr. Crowley said. “The real reason I came over was to tell you. Sometime tomorrow—I’m not going to tell you exactly when—GPS signals will go down all across London. Google maps, Mapquest, Pokemon Go, you name it. It’s going to be chaos.”

“There’s not really any point in me thwarting you,” Mr. Aziraphale said.

“There is,” Mr. Crowley said, “because if you don’t at least make an _effort_ to thwart me, I won’t ever tell you how I did it.”

“Not ever?”

“Not ever. My lips are sealed.”

Mr. Aziraphale thought about this.

“By sometime tomorrow,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I suppose I have no time to waste,” Mr. Aziraphale said.

“I suppose you don’t,” Mr. Crowley said agreeably. “Hope you’ll excuse me. I’ve got some things to set up.”

There was a moment of silence as Mr. Aziraphale watched him go.

Tracy thought of several things she could say. Including, _he came up with the plan just now, while we were talking, didn’t he? Just to give you something to do._ It would help if he didn’t actually have a head start on them . . .

“It would help,” Mr. Aziraphale said finally, in a resigned sort of way, “if I knew what a GPS is.”

“Oh, I have one on my mobile,” Tracy said promptly. “But if you _really_ want to know how it works, you should ask my handyman Mike’s son’s girlfriend, Jyoti. She wants to be an app designer. Going to school for it. Ever so clever.”

Mr. Aziraphale looked startled. He hadn’t considered it, she realized. Asking for help.

Perhaps it was time he learned. Tracy was confident in her networking skills. She would have him connected to people in no time, and if that meant that people would ask around if he vanished for another five days, all to the better. Perhaps she could even find a therapist who wasn’t going to be odd about people’s mothers.

“Come on,” Tracy said cheerfully. “I’ll take you to meet Jyoti.”

* * *

1Tracy had known him as Mr. Shadwell for what seemed like forever, and wasn’t about to change her way of addressing him just because they were living together now. As for Shadwell himself, he alternately claimed that his first name was Michael, James, Robert, or Hamish, depending on which debt collectors he was trying to avoid, but it was abundantly clear to anyone who knew him that what he called himself, inside his own head, was “Sergeant.” [ return to text ]

2 In fact, Tracy was beginning to think that Mr. Shadwell had only the most basic understanding of what she had done for a living. He seemed, for instance, to think that a flogger was some sort of ornamental handicraft that she kept around the place. Tracy was having some trouble reconciling this with a man who had, she knew perfectly well, spent time in prison, but she was coming to realize that when Mr. Shadwell panicked about witches working their lubricious wiles upon innocent witch finders, what he probably meant was, “showing their nipples.” What this meant for their prospective marriage was anyone’s guess, but Tracy herself cared far more about companionably reading the same newspaper in front of the same cozy fireplace than she did about activities that provided more of a cardiovascular workout. [ return to text ]

3When a demon promises that they won’t tell someone they have thirty-seven nipples, all you can be sure of is that precise phrase and number won’t feature. Demons love exact words. [ return to text ]

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Damaged, by lyricwritesprose](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22358056) by [Thimblerig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig)




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